


Don’t Get Fooled Again (The Pick Up My Guitar Remix)

by Dee_Laundry



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Gen, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-04-26
Updated: 2008-04-26
Packaged: 2017-10-17 19:52:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/180604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dee_Laundry/pseuds/Dee_Laundry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wilson is on vacation with Julie and realizes something.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don’t Get Fooled Again (The Pick Up My Guitar Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Surviving](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/2893) by Cobweb_Diamond. 



> Takes place in early Season Two. Remix of [Surviving](http://cobweb-diamond.livejournal.com/134298.html) by [](http://cobweb-diamond.livejournal.com/profile)[**cobweb_diamond**](http://cobweb-diamond.livejournal.com/). Story was moved from Chicago in the original to Maryland/DC for the simple reason that I know more about tourist things in the DC area. Thank you to [](http://daisylily.livejournal.com/profile)[**daisylily**](http://daisylily.livejournal.com/) for beta and to my husband for serendipitous choice of Who song.

“Babe, can you get me the platter off the top shelf there?” Julie asks on their second night at her parents’ house in the Maryland suburbs.

Wilson reaches up reflexively – she’s five-two; he stretches to reach high spots for her all the time – but his mind’s stumbling over the pet name.

 _Babe_. Like the one in the woods, innocent and naïve. He’s got a wife to support (three of them, actually, counting the exes), patients to care for, a department to run: people depend on him. He can’t close his eyes and trust that it will all work out like a little babe can, so the diminutive is disconcerting.

Besides, over the three years they’ve been married, she’s never called him that before.

He opens his mouth to ask about it, but she’s already taken the platter and gone. She and her mother, Vera, make chicken piccata for dinner; Wilson smiles throughout the conversation and doesn’t mention that it’d taste much better with less lemon juice and more paprika.

* * *

The fourth day at Julie’s parents’ house begins, as all the others have, with mild coffee and cinnamon crumble cake. Julie’s father is looking forward to visiting the Air and Space Museum this afternoon. “You men and your mechanical things!” Vera chastises Al with a twinkle in her eye, as she pours more skim milk into his coffee. “You’re lucky James is here to discuss those planes with you, babe, because we women haven’t the mind for which one’s the 1963 fighter plane control panel and which is the 1964.”

“Mom,” Julie groans, “don’t be so old-fashioned. Women can figure things like that out.”

“Well, we _can_ ,” Vera replies, “but I don’t see why we should have to, when there’s a perfectly good man here to do it.”

Wilson smiles pleasantly and eats the last of his (over-salted) crumble.

They take the Metro in, which is clean and quiet and almost empty except for a few tourists. “A very decent way to travel,” Al proclaims.

“Unlike in some cities,” Vera adds. Julie pats her mother’s knee and nods, probably thinking about the New York City subway. Wilson can’t remember the last time they were on the subway, but it definitely wasn’t empty or quiet or particularly clean. (He does remember a time a few years ago on the D train during which _he_ wasn’t quiet or clean – or empty – but when the lug you’re with picks a fight with Yankees fans and the beer starts flying, what can you do? Leave him there with his cane and his wit as his only defenses? No. You’ve got to stick his Red Sox cap on your head and get in there and start swinging.)

They’re in the Air and Space Museum for three hours, and Wilson never gets to see any of the Space side at all. There are a _lot_ of differences between the 1963 fighter plane control panel and the 1964. Julie and Vera get through the Air side, the Space side, an IMAX movie, a packet of astronaut ice cream, and two decaf Lipton teas. Wilson does get a brief moment to himself to see inside the Apollo 11 space capsule on display (during which nobody speculates loudly on how astronauts masturbate).

Wilson holds Julie’s hand as they walk to the Metro.

On the way back to the house from the station, Al takes a side street, and then another, until Vera starts to get nervous about the neighborhood they’re in. It looks fine to Wilson, but nobody asks him. “I just wanted to see if that beaner grocery was open,” Al says.

“I don’t like going there after dark,” Vera frets, and Julie admonishes them not to be racist even as she’s rolling her window up. She’s leaning over to roll up Wilson’s when they pass a grungy old record store. The music blasting out the window is so loud that it’s distorted, but Wilson makes out, “The world looks just the same, and history –” before his window is up and the car’s turning away.

“The Who,” he murmurs.

“The who?” Vera asks.

“Nothing,” Wilson says, because he’s feeling too unsettled to get into an Abbott and Costello routine. There’s a lump between his throat and his chest that he can’t seem to clear, and home is so very, very far away.

The pot roast for dinner might be dry, or it might be Wilson’s mouth. He doesn’t add anything to the conversation but he nods in what he thinks are the right places.

No one notices.

Lying next to Julie in the guest room – this used to be Julie’s brother’s room, but Wilson thinks the flowered wallpaper came later – he tries not to think. “Jules?” he whispers. She likes it when he calls her Jules, finds it endearing. To his ears, it sounds wrong (too masculine, and it always oddly reminds him of someone who’d rather be shot than find anything endearing), but she likes it on the rare occasions that he uses it, so she turns toward him. “Could we –”

“You want to...” she replies with a nod toward his side of the bed, below the blanket line.

He doesn’t trust himself to say the right thing, so he leans over to kiss her instead. A few minutes later, her head is tucked onto his collarbone and her hand’s down his pajama bottoms.

She’s too speedy, too gentle, and spends way too much time focused on the base of his shaft. He’s never told her, and he’s not going to bother starting now. By this time next year, she’ll be “making love” with someone else, and he’ll be... unmarried. That’s all he can picture, although he can picture that with one hundred percent certainty. No doubt _whatsoever_. It might be interesting, he thinks, not to be with a woman. It’s something he hasn’t tried since his dating career began in earnest. It’s –

Julie gives a little impatient grunt. She wants him done. He’s not even that interested in finishing any more, but putting up with her resulting sulk’s not worth it, so he thinks of sweat and prickles and a certain baritone voice disparaging her technique.

She coos happily, wipes her hand on his pajamas, and rolls over, taking more than half the blankets with her. He stares at the ceiling and thinks he’ll be awake all night, going over what he’s figured out, but the next thing that happens is the alarm gently beeping.

“Antiques shopping in Frederick today,” Julie notes as she stretches to turn the alarm off and kisses him somewhere in the vicinity of his mouth. Wilson smiles at her even though she’s already turning away toward the bathroom.

* * *

The seventh day at Julie’s parents’ is the last. Wilson can’t quite figure why they flew instead of driving, considering how long the trip is from Julie’s parents’ house to BWI Airport, and how long the trip will be from the Philadelphia airport back to Princeton, but Julie arranged the trip and no one asked him. Julie cries a little hugging her mom goodbye, and Al gives Wilson a manful slap on the back, reminding him to take good care of “the little girl.” Wilson smiles and doesn’t say much.

* * *

When he gets back to the hospital, nothing much has changed. Cuddy grabs him for a coffee around ten. He’s planned exactly how he’ll describe the trip to anyone who asks, but she doesn’t. House has spent the week with a new patient, having immense fun insulting every member of his patient’s family and then getting away with it with a spectacular and obscure diagnosis. Cuddy tried to talk to him about apologizing, “but he was too busy sequestering himself in his office with his loud music and his sanity-defying self-satisfaction. You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I do,” Wilson says, sipping his coffee, and Cuddy’s gone in the next second, off to do very important things.

Wilson expects a lunch-time visitor but doesn’t get one. He’s almost hurt for a minute until he realizes predictability is for suckers. _Boring_.

House turns up in the Oncology ward that afternoon, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake, as Wilson’s doing rounds. Scattering the residents with a well-timed “booga-booga” and a flailing of arms, House smirks and thwacks Wilson’s shin with his cane. “Miss me?”

Wilson stares, experiencing a brief moment of insanity when he considers actually telling the truth for once. Instead he just smiles at House, a smile that lifts his cheeks and shows actual teeth, and says, “I survived.”


End file.
